The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (review)

Using an array of sources ranging from newspapers and tourist guidebooks to films, organizational reports, census data, court records, and illustrations, Mary Ting Yi Lui presents a fascinating deconstruction of the significance of the sensational murder mystery of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel against the backdrop of the broader history of the formation, development, and evolution of New York's Chinatown.

On June 18, 1909, the body of Sigel was found with a rope around her neck in a trunk in Leon Ling's apartment above a Chinese restaurant in New York City. Ling had been missing for close to a week before concern (not to mention the emanation of a discernibly foul odor from the room) prompted Ling's cousin, the proprietor of the restaurant, to call the police. To the surprise of Ling's cousin and the police officer, in the middle of the room was a large trunk inside of which was the body of a young woman. As police searched the crime scene, they found numerous love letters addressed to Ling from various American women. Once the body was identified, the police ascertained that the dead woman was responsible for thirty-five of the letters. Almost immediately, various press accounts emerged in the attempt to provide some explanation as to how it was that a respectable young woman of the middle class became romantically involved with a Chinese immigrant. Revelations about the romance between Sigel and Ling had shocked the public because of its inter-racial nature; even more scandalous was that the relationship had been a voluntary one. Contemporary popular representations had made the existence of inter-racial relationships more palatable by casting most of these white women to be either immigrant and/or poor, lured into these deviant relationships because of their opium addiction or their enslavement to material desires. That a young woman of Sigel's standing—middle class, respectable, the granddaughter of a socially prominent New Yorker—was involved in an inter-racial romance disrupted these predominant perceptions and contributed to the sensationalism of the case.

The public's intense fascination with the crime—as evidenced by front-page coverage in the daily press and in the mounting of an international manhunt—raises questions as to what it was about the case that resonated with the reading public. The press seemed less concerned with finding out the truth about what had happened than with framing the crime within a set of conventions that reaffirmed popular views on race, class, gender and sexuality. For Lui, what is significant is the process and motivation behind the drive to transform the Sigel murder into a morality tale highlighting the tensions and dangers of urban life, female mobility in the city, the role and efficacy of female missionary work, and the presence of Chinese immigrants.

Lui argues that the coverage of the case drew such negative public attention to existing inter-racial relationships and the permeability of social and spatial boundaries that the result was further restrictions on Chinese American mobility. Popular narratives had already constructed the image of Chinatown as full of hidden dangers replete with prostitution, gambling and opium dens; in the immediate aftermath of the murder, the police and anti-vice crusaders increased their efforts at rooting out these vices by targeting all white women inside, and scrutinizing all Chinese men outside, the borders of Chinatown. For both white women and Chinese men, the effect was further regulation of their behaviors and increased restrictions on their mobility. For white women, this came at a time of ongoing debates over the viability of domestic Chinese mission work, questions over women's roles in that effort, and Progressive-era reformers' attempts to define women and children as a distinct social class in need of special legal protection. The press's unsubstantiated identification of Sigel as...